Letter Urges Voters to Electrify Everything Instead of Choosing Between Affordability and Climate

An October 5, 2026 letter to the editors of the Boston Globe reads as follows:

“So we are preparing to spend billions of dollars adapting to the effects of climate change. Sea walls, levees, and other forms of flood prevention are definitely needed, and there’s no time to waste. But remember when steps to decrease carbon emissions, thereby slowing climate change, were deemed ‘too expensive?’ We still need to decrease emissions, and quickly, to prevent yet more catastrophic consequences. Climate change is still going to be bad, but we can prevent it from being even worse. Let’s clean up our energy generation, electrify everything, and vote climate.”

Susan Donaldson, Northampton

Energy plays an increasingly important role in today’s world. Instead of treating electrification as one of many positive goals to move us toward decarbonization, it’s time to see it is essential — we need to electrify everything quickly.

What does it mean to “electrify everything?” When you electrify everything, you switch how you power your home, vehicles, business, and community. You move away from fossil fuels to electricity — and, eventually, that electricity will be generated by renewable energy. It is a very important pathway of global decarbonization — the transition of virtually all building, transportation, and industrial systems to electric because electricity is the only rapidly decarbonizing, widely-available, and scalable fuel option.

For people who still have questions about the connection between emissions and our warming world, the field of attribution science now helps to identify the exact role that climate change contributes to extreme weather events. Through attribution science, scientists compare two versions of the world using one climate model, explains the Union of Concerned Scientists. The first version incorporates human-induced heat-trapping emissions; the second one leaves these emissions out.

By comparing these two different climate scenarios, scientists can see how much human activities have changed extreme weather and long term climate trends. There’s no arguing against it any longer: global warming is caused by the burning of fossil fuels. There is no question any longer that emissions are changing our climate and causing extreme weather events.

Big Oil keeps denying their culpability, however.

On Monday, four Supreme Court justices expressed skepticism about Big Oil’s argument that the Clean Air Act explicitly prevents lawsuits against polluters. “It’s like, wow, like, where is the text for that? Where’s the support for that? Where’s the precedent for that? Where’s the anything for that?” asked Justice Elena Kagan. (As a reminder, Judge Samuel Alito has recused himself from these deliberations: he owns share of oil stock.)

In the US, more than 60 state and local governments are similarly in court to seek damages from oil companies.

In fact, the affordability crisis that everyday consumers in the US are facing has been driven largely by the cost of fossil fuels. Yet the largest 250 oil and gas companies only own about 1.42% of the global renewable energy capacity in operation. CleanTechnica’s Steve Hanley acknowledges that, “no matter how much we decry materialism, virtually all our daily decisions are based on economic considerations.”

Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee proposed cuts earlier this year to the taxes and policy charges that comprise about one-quarter of his state’s residential utility bills, as reported by Aton and French on Politico. Tradeoffs between bill relief as immediate gratification versus investments in efficiency, electrification, and renewables are “challenging” to the states, the Politico reporters continue, and “are often short-sighted.” Just ask McKee, who became the first incumbent governor in eight years to lose a primary.

Questions over compliance with New York state’s 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), which called for steep reductions in carbon emissions, have also been prominent during Governor Kathy Hochul’s first full term. Hochul took the position that full compliance with the law would impose high costs on ratepayers. Now she’s in hot water by some members of her own party.

It’s time: we need more people in public office to stand up for a clean climate.

Cait Conley is a Congressional candidate in California. The West Point grad has won three Bronze Stars and was deployed six times to the Middle East. She makes “fighting climate change as a national security issue” one of her campaign priorities, which climate activist Bill McKibben supports.

Yes, a clean-energy-for-all campaign has the potential to address many concerns that face US citizens. National security is one. Rising energy costs is another —and voter demand for action is intense. The clean energy industry has matured from its roots in the environmental movement to a market force that competes with fossil fuels, and it can be a strong talking point for mid-term elections. Clean energy is affordable — and it will save our planet, too.